Killing Fields
December 2018
Some memories only surface at the boundary between waking and sleep. These are memories repressed by your conscious mind, like human heads grasped by the hair and held underwater. Years pass – the thrashing stops. Then, when your back is turned, the corpses rise to surface, wide-eyed and still as dolls.
I don’t know what triggered the memory. It was a normal day at the hospital – two codes: one from an MI, the other from a hemorrhagic stroke, the chaplain giving her usual spiel, “Let us remember that he was loved and loved others…” etc. My wife was trying to get to sleep. I was trying to sleep too, my arms tight around my half of the comforter. By 2 am, I gave up counting sheep and let my mind run free like a border collie. It visited the rooms of my memory in no apparent order, at times opening multiple doors simultaneously, and I watched the screens projected on the back of my eyelids as one watches the TVs in Costco, mesmerized by their variegated brightness rather than by what they showed. One by one, the screens converged on a hotel room. A girl was waking up in tears, turning to me, and saying, “All those people — there were so many of them.” The sound of her crying filled my private theater. Each screen then moved onto something different: a motorcycle cab, an emaciated cow, a tower built of human skulls.
I got up and went to the living room. I sat in the dark and watched it rain. After five months of New England winter, it was almost spring.
“Why are you up so early?” My wife asked as she put on the water for her coffee. “I thought you were off today?”
“Bad dreams,” I smiled.
———
That year, I had just graduated from college and was home for the summer before starting medical school. I was dating a girl—I’ll call her Chloe—I had met at a house party in New York earlier that year. Chloe was two years older than me, studying law in the city, and from a rich family that lived in the most expensive neighborhood in Seoul. Chloe was home for the summer as well, and I felt like a total grown-up walking around with a girl who wore designer handbags and heels instead of JanSport and Rainbows. During the day, I worked at a cram school where I wrote college application essays for kids I had never met. I would pick a school, say Cornell, and write all the Cornell essays in one day. It felt like whoring, but it was the easiest way to make money back then. I spent all I made on our dates.
If we weren’t talking about how difficult it was to find a place to have sex in Seoul, we were talking about eloping overseas. In fact, we already had eloped once to a small fishing village on the southern tip of Korea. My parents and I weren’t on speaking terms. I had tested them plenty over the years, but always discreetly, giving excuses which they knew were lies, and this pretense showed that I at least acknowledged my crimes. To openly declare war by not even bothering to lie was something my parents didn’t expect from their eldest son.
Chloe and I debated various destinations. Having just flown back from the states, we didn’t want to fly long distance. That left China, Japan, Taiwan, or Southeast Asia.
“How about Cambodia?” She said, showing me an magazine article on her iPhone. We were sitting in a Starbucks on Garosugil on a Sunday morning. Lonely businessmen sat around us, sipping iced Americanos while they typed away at their laptops. Summer was in full bloom, flooding the café with sunlight. Monsoon season would arrive two weeks later.
“What’s in Cambodia?”
“This ruin called Angkor Wat.” She scrolled down to show me pictures. “Isn’t it amazing?”
I didn’t give her an answer. To be honest, I was growing hesitant about the whole ‘eloping overseas’ idea. Despite my American education, there still remained in me a kernel of Confucian values that said, ‘You don’t go traveling abroad with a girl before you marry her.’ I was on the verge of chickening out when I read an essay called “Summer in Algiers” by Albert Camus in a hotel room Chloe had reserved for the day. Before leaving home earlier that morning, I had picked out the book from my bookshelf, which held a fair share of existential philosophy that I devoured during boarding school to cure my sexual frustration.
Re-reading this essay at the present time, I have little clue why it led to such a great revelation, but on that summer day, the word Algiers was enough foreplay to rouse me to a firm conclusion: I had to go to Cambodia.
I asked Chloe again to confirm. Yes, she would go at all costs.
“What are you going to tell your mom?” Her dad, who was a hedge fund manager, was rarely around it seemed.
“I’ll tell her that I’m going with a girlfriend.”
“She’s not going to believe that. What if she wants to see pictures?”
“I’ll tell her that we lost our camera.”
Chloe was that kind of girl, and I liked her for it.
That evening, we bought our flight tickets, and I returned home with my news, calm like Leonidas before the Persian army.
———
One week later, Chloe and I were on a plane bound for Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We arrived late at night, hungover from the in-flight wine. Out the window of our pre-arranged cab to the hotel, I saw the wide, tree-lined streets of any regular Asian city. I remember lying on the hotel bed that night, thinking how far away I was from home, how easy it had been to leave.
We had a continental breakfast on the top floor of the hotel the next morning, with CNN playing on the wall mount TVs. The restaurant offered a nice view of the city, where red spires of Buddhist temples grew tall like hyacinths over a gray lawn of concrete.
“Pretty city,” she said. “I can’t wait to go on the architecture tour.”
“Yeah, me too.”
I had thought Cambodia was going to be a jungle, not a picturesque town. Chloe had reserved a walking tour for our first day in the city. In fact, she had single-handedly planned our entire itinerary. Perks of dating an older girl, I thought.
We realized the extent of our mistake as soon as we set foot outside the hotel. The air, clouded by dust kicked up by motorcycles, reeked of gasoline and rotting fruit. To make matters worse, there was a strike going on by the main road where men in red bandanas were chanting an incomprehensible slogan. Chloe, in her white sleeveless dress and Chanel clutch bag, looked the prime target for mugging. Our ‘architecture tour’, led by a local university student, turned out to be a maze-like walk through dilapidated communes built in the 80s, where we witnessed the living conditions of the urban poor: entire families living in closet-sized rooms, women doing laundry in water the color of sewage, children weaving around us like a pack of stray dogs – in sum, the opposite of the purposeful blindness that defines tourism.
After a full day of walking in the sweltering heat, we caught a tuk-tuk (the local slang for motorcycle cab) to Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a restaurant and bar that was once a meeting place for foreign journalists in the early 90s – or so they claim. We collapsed at our table and started laughing in denial as the A/C slowly brought us back to our senses. We had to spend six more days in this jungle.
_____
“Do you want to check out the Killing Fields?” Chloe asked me during breakfast two days later.
After two days of exploring the city, we had overcome our shell shock to the point that we were now bargaining our tuk-tuk fares. Today was our last day in Phnom Penh before our 8-hour bus ride to Siam Reap—a trip that merits a whole story to itself, featuring fried tarantulas—to see Angkor Wat.
“Killing Fields?” The name didn’t sound particularly inviting.
“It’s like a mass graveyard. Apparently there was a genocide here, around when the Vietnam War happened. I think it’ll be cool.” I remembered that Chloe had been a history major in college.
“How far is it?”
“About 30 minutes?”
A throng of tuk-tuk drivers assailed us outside the hotel like flies on a carcass. After some bargaining, a glassy-eyed driver agreed to drive us round trip for a meager sum. We got on his tuk-tuk and held onto the metal handlebars as we joined the ever-flowing stream of motorcycles that is the national river of Cambodia.
I held my breath at a foul odor as we left the city center. I soon found out its source — we were trailing a garbage truck. Keep in mind that this was no water-tight, mechanized garbage truck that you see in the United States. This truck, an thoroughly open-air affair, was leaking a steady trail of sewage on the road. We foolishly didn’t say anything, hoping that the truck will soon make a turn, and thus we tailgated the truck for a solid ten minutes. Olfaction is the earliest to evolve of our five senses, the sense most directly connected to the seat of memory, and I can bring up those ten minutes as clearly as yesterday.
The paved road disintegrated into a dirt lane flanked by an endless succession of local shops, all selling the same goods and advertisements for Angkor Beer and/or Anchor Beer—I couldn’t tell which one was the rip off of which—plastered over their tin walls. Billboards with the same government official, a sinister-looking man in glasses, marked every half-mile of the road.
30 minutes later, I looked up from my nausea to see a fenced area half the size of a soccer field and a temple-like structure in the middle of it. “Genocidal Centre”, a sign at the entrance read. The driver signaled to us that he would wait here. On a second look, both his eyes were hazy with cataracts. I wondered how he could see the road – had he trailed the garbage truck on purpose?
We paid the $2 entrance fee and entered the outdoor museum. White tourists, fanny packs around their waists, stood around reading the English signs. I soon found out the reason for the catwalks: the ground was chock-full of skeletons. We passed descriptions of the Khmer Rouge, its communist leader Pol Pot, and the massacre of 1 million people, or 1/7 of the country’s population, within a period of 5 years. We gazed at the black and white photographs of the recently killed.
There were various displays along the catwalk: a stack of bones, with their marrow hollowed out, that bore uncanny resemblance to wafer rolls, a pile of ragged clothes archeologists must have undressed from skeletons. Sickles, hammers, and other metal gadgets told me that the massacre must have been a personal affair, conducted one by one by human muscle.
In the middle of the field stood a temple-like structure. As we walked towards it, I saw that what filled the tower were rows of human skulls stacked on top of one another.
“Scary stuff,” I said. Chloe and I hadn’t spoken since we had entered the place. A genocide museum didn’t make the best date course.
“Can we sit down somewhere?” Chloe asked.
We sat on a bench by the snack bar. I got up and bought a bottle of water.
“This is crazy,” she said. “I mean, how can someone do something like this?”
“I don’t know. I guess that’s war,” I said, and I really didn’t know.
Trees grew on the boundaries of the mass graveyard. Even here, birds chirped. Children were playing tag behind the snack bar. We finished the bottle of water and returned to where our tuk-tuk driver waited.
Luckily, there were no garbage trucks on our way back. We passed a herd of cows, emaciated cows like I had never seen. Their hides hung on the spine like bedsheets on a clothesline. Children in uniform, returning from school on their mothers’ motorcycles, waved hello to us. It was then that I fathomed the idea of having a uniform for schoolchildren. There must have been a time in Korea where a child could not afford more than one set of clothes, much less dye his hair orange. I recalled watching some news about the discovery of mass graves from the Korean War: rusted wires loose around the wrists where flesh had been.
We showered — the smell of sewage would not wash away — and went straight to bed after an early dinner. We were both exhausted. We had a bus to catch in the morning.
I woke to the sound of crying in the middle of the night. I rubbed my eyes and saw Chloe sitting up on the bed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did you have a nightmare?”
“All those people — there were so many of them,” she said as she continued to cry.
“What people?” I then understood that she wasn’t talking about a dream but about what we’d seen that day.
I sat up and held her until she stopped crying. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.” What else could I say? It wasn’t as if we knew any of the victims. The incident had happened before either of us were born. It was just stuff in history books. I waited until she calmed down and went back to sleep. We had a full day of traveling tomorrow, and after that, the rest of the summer in Seoul, and after that, the rest of our lives. Killing Fields had nothing to do with us – just a depressing museum.
Only now do I understand that the world is a killing field and that we are the stuff of history books.